The mediocre works of an amateur learning to make stuff

Warlock (DnD Wrath of Ashardalon)

The guy playing a Warlock in the game that I started running a couple weeks ago didn’t really have a mini to use, so he had to settle for a generic caster for our first session. Well, time to correct that!

I had a few miniatures lying around, but not many that would fit the character… in the end, I settled for painting a Human Cultist from the Wrath of Ashardalon game, and since our Warlock had made a deal with the Archfiend, I thought of giving it a themed paintjob. But first… to clean and prime. I hate the amount of flash, the horrible moldlines and the poor assembly on these DnD boardgames’ miniatures… I always end up leaving some flash because I just get tired of cleaning it. Had to do some filling here and there (mostly on the back of the cloak), but it ultimately came out pretty good.

Who’s THAT handsome devil? More on him in the near future…

I actually did a mix of the usual white primer with the black craft store acryllic paint I tend to use to prime my models, and I must say that I don’t think I’m EVER going to use anything else ever again. Made a small bottle of the stuff and I think I’ll stick to using it in the future – it just covers the area so nicely with a single, thin pass, and is just the right color to paint both light and dark colors over!

So after it was primed all I had to do is to start laying down the base tones: dark cloak and robe, pale skintone, metallic dagger, brown skulls and general apparel. I’ve gotten used to sticking my miniatures on a tall glass rod I hold and can move around for all those hard-to-reach spots, and it just makes painting the nooks and crannies so much easier!

Did some very light drybrushing on the skulls as well, just to get a good feeling for the texture on these. This guy has a bunch of those hanging from his back, and then more at the top of his rod/scepter thingy. So after painting all of the bonestuff in a lighter beige, it’s time to bring out the washes.

Nothing like a nice coat of Nuln Oil to get those base shadows well-defined That, coupled with minor highlights on anything that is not his tunic/robe/cloak really helps define the tinier details the artist sculpted into the miniature.

By now I was pretty happy with what I had established, so it was time to undetake a daunting task… wet blending. I wanted to give the miniature a flaming motif (inspired by the amazing work done by this artist on his own cultists), since… Warlock serving the Archfiend and all. Time to bring out the water, the acryllic medium and the wet palette (read: sponge and paper towel).

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Starting to blend red into the dark of the tunic, I realised that the pigments in my craft store red are complete crap. Took me way too much time to get a solid base of red… probably should have started with brown. Eventually, I moved on to getting some orange on top of that red while it was still fresh, and yellow into the orange.

Watching it dry, it seemed to me as if the yellow was on too strong… time to tone it back down with some very diluted red ink, and blending it with diluted yellow to re-establish the strong tones at the center of the flames. In retrospective, I probably should’ve put more red and less yellow, but I’m not at all displeased with the final result.

Some highlighting on the skulls, the skin and the dagger, cleaning up here and there and painting the base black and I’m done with it for now. It’s going to need a fancy base in the future, but I’ll tackle that once I’m done with some other projects I’ve got afloat…